Aficionados, Snobs, and Hipsters

Completing my trilogy of musings re: aficionados and snobs (part one here, part two there)...

Chowhounding (or fashionhounding, or any other sort of hounding) is hard. There are a thousand cheese danishes in the naked city, and nearly all of them suck. Scoring a great one is like finding a needle in a haystack. Faced with that dizzying task, most people would reluctantly turn to "the best place in town", which is usually the most expensive place in town with the biggest publicity budget in town. Such places may churn out fancy-looking stuff with fancy-sounding ingredients, but it's usually a loveless shiny show, unlikely to provide deeper deliciousness. Somewhere, an elderly Polish woman stolidly bakes unloved splendor in her unexceptional-appearing bakery, praying earnestly under her breath as she rolls out the pastry. She is our grail.

Redemption isn't to be found in heightened splendor, it's in the quest for the heartfelt. And that quest is a tough one, so while we may fight the good fight in one narrow realm or another, we all inevitably settle for mediocrity in most realms. Your clothes are complacent. Or your furniture. Or your pens and pencils. So there's no good reason to judge people for being lazy or clueless about the area in which you happen to focus.

I really respect hipsters. They, alone, aspire to a consistent level of all-consuming omni-fetishization most of us (me included) consider supremely annoying.